Open plan or seperate rooms
- Thread starter Miss Chicken
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Amaris
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I'm not sure. We have a utility room, so I don't know what the original intent of this room was, but "bedroom" would have been generous.
Of course, this is nothing new. How many times have we seen "two bedroom house!" and when you look at the "bedroom", it's a 5x7 room? I've seen that a few times. There was also one realtor who showed us a 3 bedroom house, which listed the anteroom area between the kitchen and the stairs that led up to the attic as a "bedroom". Seriously, we're talking the 4 foot wide 6 foot long space around the stairs.
The third "bedroom," by the way, was the attic. My parents got out from under that albatross, but we had to move into an apartment to make it work.
A small room without a closet is classified as a den in realty ads. Put in a closet, and that same room can now can be classified as a bedroom.
Before moving here, I was renting rooms out of peoples' homes for 10 years. One "bedroom" had no closet, only a clothes rack, and was an interior room with no windows. The overhead light had to be on all the time. When I first moved in, they were remodeling, there were seven people living in the house, and only one bathroom. The door to the bathroom hadn't been framed yet, so there was just a sheet hanging there for privacy. My room was on the other side of the bathroom, so you could hear EVERYTHING. I was paying $400 a month for that thing but could only afford to pay $100 a week. Took forever to get out of that place. I'm paying the same price for my studio apartment now.
One poor guy there was living in the utility room with the washer and dryer, which had originally been the back porch and later framed in. That's why I didn't have a window.
Before moving here, I was renting rooms out of peoples' homes for 10 years. One "bedroom" had no closet, only a clothes rack, and was an interior room with no windows. The overhead light had to be on all the time. When I first moved in, they were remodeling, there were seven people living in the house, and only one bathroom. The door to the bathroom hadn't been framed yet, so there was just a sheet hanging there for privacy. My room was on the other side of the bathroom, so you could hear EVERYTHING. I was paying $400 a month for that thing but could only afford to pay $100 a week. Took forever to get out of that place. I'm paying the same price for my studio apartment now.
One poor guy there was living in the utility room with the washer and dryer, which had originally been the back porch and later framed in. That's why I didn't have a window.
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Same with offices, when I took my current job, I had it written into my contract that I have to have my own office - no open plan for me.
What's wrong with swinging doors? They make it easy to make a quick exit in case a brawl or a gunfight breaks out!Oh, and just to give a little taste of what my house was like when I moved in: The aforementioned kitchen had SWINGING DOORS.
My apartment is about 700 square feet. If it had a separate living room, bedroom and kitchen, each room would be the size of a prison cell.
I like open plans aesthetically, but I also like wall space for furniture, which it makes somewhat more difficult to do.
The biggest room in my place has windows covering two walls and build in bookcases covering the other two walls. You can't put furniture anywhere, the couch is against a window. Now maybe you're supposed to put a couch set in the middle but that seems stupid and room shrink-ing.
That can't have originally been a bedroom. Was it ever part of a larger room, and somebody just put a wall in to divide it? My aunt and uncle did that with one of their houses, so my cousin could have a ground floor bedroom. It used to be part of the living room.My bed blocks most of the door's access. It's not something I intended, but the layout of my bedroom is odd. On the side where I would normally be able to put a bed, is a closet. So if I put the bed there, I can't get in the closet. On the other side of the room is all of the outlets, and the electric baseboard heater, which means I can't put the bed there. I'll explain below:
The top right hand corner is the door to the rest of the house. The bottom right hand corner is the closet. The bottom of the image has the door which leads outside. On the left you can see the large baseboard heater. The smaller, thinner rectangles are light switches, and incoming line connections for cables, and phone lines. For some reason, they have everything running through this room, so I have wires and cables everywhere.
The room's dimensions are 10'x10'.
My dad did something similar in the house where he and my grandparents and I lived. The house originally had a dining room downstairs, but someone removed one wall to make an L-shaped living room. Then years later, when my grandparents started having trouble getting up and down the stairs, he converted it into a bedroom for them. It had a decent window, but no closet. My dad's room was in the basement, and I was upstairs (and glad to finally not be yelled at if I wanted to stay up and read past my official bedtime).
Furniture can be placed elsewhere than against the walls...
I like how our house is set up, an open floor plan for the Kitchen, Eat in Area and Family room. The rest are all separate rooms, thats how our last home was also. I think thats how I would want all my houses. So a little bit of open plan and mostly individual spaces.
Eh, that just strikes me as an inefficient use of space. It's segmenting things off rather than creating room. I accept it's an inevitability in some floor plans where you have to have a sofa in essentially the middle of the room, but it's not at all my preference.
It's also a terrible idea for things like bookshelves, TV stands, etc.
My apartment is also 700 square feet and manages to have separate rooms for both the kitchen and bedroom. While the kitchen is tiny and the living room is small, it is workable for one. I turned the dining room into a combination of expansion of the kitchen and a computer nook.
I wish that I had the seniority to make a demand like that during a job offer. Placing programmers in an open plan office is lunacy.
Think it all comes down to how it's implemented and the size of the premises.
In a small house or apartment open plan with no hallways can result in more usable splace and avoids tiny rooms.
Our apartment is only 550 square feet and I'm glad we don't loose any space to hallways or some such bullshit as it's small enough as it. Other apartments in the building have hallways (though partially due to piss-poor design) and it results in small rooms and impacts usability - a fucking joke when you consider this building was intended to provide accessible housing for people with physical disabilities.
Our house is nominally open plan - living room through galley-style kitchen into dining room. It's a huge pain in the ass when you're trying to make Thanksgiving dinner, as I found out last year, because everyone wants to keep going back and forth or "hang out" in a kitchen that has no space for that sort of behavior. Surprised nobody got burned on the oven door. Anyway, I don't mind living/kitchen/dining openness, but this house has no flow, and my office/the nursery is also open to the living room, and that's really not working for us either. And the master bedroom is off the kitchen, and fully across the house from the only bathroom. I guess it worked okay when my grandparents built it in 1954?
Yeah, we're saving up a down payment so we can get out of here. We rent from my parents so we can leave as soon as we can afford it. My parents might sell both houses and come with us, too, if we get the right property (read: with in-law apartment or guest house).
Yeah, we're saving up a down payment so we can get out of here. We rent from my parents so we can leave as soon as we can afford it. My parents might sell both houses and come with us, too, if we get the right property (read: with in-law apartment or guest house).
Amen. My kids would hate open plan as much as I do. I live in a bog-standard 1930s British semi-detached and it took us a while to find a house which didn't have the wall between the lounge and the dining room knocked through. Apart from seriously needing two separate reception rooms we also needed the actual wall for bookcases and other furniture. I also couldn't fathom having an open plan house with young children. How the hell do you contain the babies and toddlers and keep them safe when you have to run out of the room for something? Our house when our kids were tiny, also a 1930s semi, had the original downstairs layout of a long hallway with the lounge and dining room off it and the kitchen at the end, alongside the dining room. I had kiddie gates in front of the lounge doorway (which was pretty much a playroom for several years), the kitchen and the stairs. I was better off than friends who had to put two gates on top of each other to keep their little monkeys contained, but my kids would have wreaked havoc if there were no doorways for kiddie gates. Apparently there are some children out there who aren't hell-bent on destruction the nanosecond they're let loose, but my toddlers didn't fall into the category. I had kiddie gates and still used a playpen to keep the youngest of the tribe safe when I had to dash out the room. The gates were removed once the kids could climb over them. I think I wept that day.
A room that small isn't the norm in North America, but it is here, and it's a nightmare. Even newer houses in England often aren't built with built-in wardrobes, and as long as a room can fit a single sized bed (European single, not North American twin) it can be classed as a bedroom. The third bedroom in 1930s houses can that small, though they were most likely not intended to be used as bedrooms, at least not in the winter months, as they have no fireplace (these houses would have originally been heated with coal fires). It's impossible to fit a bed and a wardrobe in these tiny rooms. My daughter had this kind of small bedroom (6 x 7.5) when we first moved in to our house. She had a loft bed with desk and wardrobe underneath and, against the other wall, a bookcase and a chest of drawers. It worked all right when we first moved in and she was nine years old, but five years later she had to crab-walk into the room and was too tall to use the desk. We had a loft conversion done so the boys got their own bedroom each in the loft and my daughter now has their old, big bedroom (the boys sharing a bedroom wasn't exactly working, either). The stairs to the loft took up some of the small bedroom so now it's officially an office/nursery as it no longer fits a single bed. The stupid thing is that the other two original bedrooms are huge. It's just the way these houses were designed.
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